Agent-oriented programming (AOP) is a programming paradigm introduced roughly thirty years ago as an approach to problems in Artificial Intelligence (AI). An agent is a piece of software that can perceive its environment (e.g., through sensors) and act upon that environment (e.g., through actuators). A cognitive agent is a specific type of agent...

Much of what agents (people, robots, etc.) do is dividing effort between several activities. In order to facilitate efficient divisions, we study contributions to such activities and advise on stable divisions that result in high socialwelfare. To this end, for each model (game), we find the Nash equilibria and their social welfare. A Nash...

One of the more notable technologies to enter and affect everyday life is information and communication technology (ICT). Since the twentieth century, ICTs have had a considerable impact on many aspects of everyday life. This impact on individuals and society is rarely neutral; ICTs can have both desirable and undesirable consequences — ethical...

This dissertation is motivated by the need, in today’s globalist world, for a precise way to enable governments, organisations and other regulatory bodies to evaluate the constraints they place on themselves and others. An organisation’s modus operandi is enacting and fulfilling contracts between itself and its participants. Yet, organisational...

Multi-robot teams have potential advantages over a single robot. Robots in a team can serve different functionalities, so a team of robots can be more efficient, robust and reliable than a single robot. In this dissertation, we are in particular interested in human level intelligent multi-robot teams. Social deliberation should be taken into...

Coactive Design breaks with traditional approaches by focusing on effective management of the interdependencies among human-machine team members. Providing support for interdependence enables members of a human-machine team to recognize problems and adapt. Support for a variety of interdependence relations makes a team flexible. Flexibility, in...

Negotiation is an important activity in human society, and is studied by various disciplines, ranging from economics and game theory, to electronic commerce, social psychology, and artificial intelligence. Traditionally, negotiation is a necessary, but also time-consuming and expensive activity. Therefore, in the last decades there has been a...

Nowadays, camera systems are installed in military areas as well as in public spaces like schools, shopping malls, airports, and football stadiums. Human operators are monitoring the screens, looking for any signs of unwanted behavior and negative incidents. The task requires working personnel 24/7. With the ever increasing number of cameras,...

Language modeling plays a critical role in natural language processing and understanding. Starting from a general structure, language models are able to learn natural language patterns from rich input data. However, the state-of-the-art language models only take advantage of words themselves, which are not sufficient to characterize the language...

Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in employing Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) as companions or coaches. These roles are typically performed by humans and require exhibiting certain social behaviors, such as providing social support. For interactions between users and coaching or companion ECAs to become truly social,...

The research reported on in this thesis is part of a larger research project that aims to develop a negotiation support system called the Pocket Negotiator. This thesis focuses on the question how such a system can represent and reason about a user’s preferences between the possible outcomes of a negotiation. In real-world negotiations, there...

Taking major life decisions, e.g. what career to follow, is difficult and sometimes emotional. One has to find out what exactly one wants, consider the long-term consequences of the decisions and be empathetic for loved ones affected by the decisions. Decision making also deals with establishing and browsing a vast number of alternatives and...

In this thesis, culture is interpreted as a property of a group of people who share the meaning they attach to symbols, have a common way of expressing their opinions and feelings, and share value systems to judge what is good or bad. The unwritten rules of a culture govern the interpretation of observations and emotions and how to react...

In the last two decades we witnessed a rapid increase of the computational power governed by Moore's Law. As a side effect, the affordability of cheaper and faster CPUs increased as well. Therefore, many new “smart” devices flooded the market and made informational systems widely spread. The number of users of information systems has also...

The central aim of this thesis is the design of generic and efficient automated strategies for two-party negotiations in which negotiating parties do not reveal their preferences explicitly. A strategy for negotiation is the decision mechanism for determining the actions of a negotiator. Generic refers to the idea that the strategy needs no...

Recently, the Royal Netherlands Navy (RNLN) is executing missions in coastal regions with a lot of civil traffic. Furthermore, the opponent of a typical modern mission is not as apparent as was the case during e.g., the Cold War. In the direct vicinity of naval vessels are many objects and it is increasingly complex to identify which of those...